Red Corner

Red Corner is quite obviously a comment on the current situation in Red China. Being a good friend of the Dalai Lama and Tibet in general, the "the Chinese government and army are all bad people" argument is what keeps this film going. It could almost be considered a crash course on what is still going on in China today. Don't get me wrong, the film is actually quite well done and has a good story to go with it which makes it more than a two hour CBS special.

The whole plot centers around the Gere character being framed for a murder of a Chinese girl. The girl just happens to be the daughter of an important general which makes Gere's chances of survival all the less. Sure, all of the cliches are built into this film, especially the wrongfully imprisoned man (haven't the 90's been a real haven to these kinds of films ever since "The Fugitive?"). But the plot is still interesting the film throughout and other than a few twists that seemed unnecessary, keeps focus until the end. I never will understand why Gere didn't just stay at the embassy, he must have been somewhat crazy.

The bond between the two main characters starts off very cold and warms until the end with an airport scene that was very fitting. After watching the film you'll know what I mean. The chase scene through the city is very exciting although at times farfetched, but still makes for some good action in between a few dramatic scenes. Even without on screen violence ala American History X or Saving Private Ryan, this film still manages to invoke fear simply knowing that the Chinese will do whatever they please, regardless of human life.

This film only helps to show China as an unhumanitary state with archaic laws and traditions. When one is forced to plead guilty in order to have leaniency directed towards them, something is really wrong. Hopefully this film will open some eyes to the situation and be a catalyst to future change.

7/10 stars.

I came across this movie on Hulu last night by accident, after failing to stream two other movies, and am overall glad I decided to "settle" for it. It definitely could have been better in several ways, but the historical/legal aspect of it, set in transitional 90's Communist China is actually pretty outstanding and memorable. As one other user commented, the Chinese acting is perfectly convincing and even frightening in how realistic it is, but unfortunately Richard Gere's character is a little too...I don't know, idiotic? for my liking. Still, I wouldn't say he single-handedly ruined the movie.

Reading the production notes and trivia on here is interesting to me because it shows how the producers really did capture the reality of what goes on in Red China. I visited all over China and Lhasa, Tibet, right after the olympics and can vouch that the same legal situation still exists there today. In Beijing, we drove by a large, concrete and windowless court-building with the CCP emblem (seen many times in the film, and omnipresent in China in general) and when asked what the building was, my tour guide just responded plainly, "That's where you go to die."

For a foreigner, yeah, it might take a murder or espionage charge to keep you imprisoned indefinitely over there, but for Chinese citizens, many crimes are still punishable by execution without a fair trial, just as the film accurately portrays.

So, if you're into Chinese history or culture, then this is definitely worth watching, even more than once. If not, then don't watch it.

Essentially what we are shown here is not the classical American court drama. When our 'Mr. Deeds' goes to town, the town is Beijing, and his case becomes a show-trial in the cockpit of a new Chinese revolution that is taking place between the old-guard Maoists and the modernisers.

Richard Gere's American is an alienated, rootless 'Rick' caught in the cultural cross-fire between two power blocs. It is his enforced engagement with the reality of another world-view and the struggle of an intelligent Chinese woman to redeem the revolutionary excesses of her culture that lead directly to the Casablanca-esque ending, where love is sublimated beyond the personal to an ideal understanding and identification - 'You have a family here' - with the historical plight of a people.

This explains Richard Gere's unusually selfless performance, where he has had the taste and intelligence to let the women, particularly his Chinese defence lawyer, dominate every situation and every scene. Indeed, this feminist tendency in the film is also reflected in the consistently hostile view taken of the militaristic structure of Chinese state power as so much authoritarian posturing. As symbol of a new China the young woman lawyer is most effective: The ancient Greeks also saw the spirit of unbiased law as female, and Shakespeare's Portia is another such paradigm. And the actress portraying her illuminates the screen with her passionate intellectual intensity.

There is an effective parallelism to the revolutionary acts which destroyed the young lawyer's father during the time of the Cultural Revolution, leaving her with crippling and unresolved guilt, and the barrel of a gun in the hands of the murdered girl's father which alone can resolve the historical tensions at work in the courtroom, and reverse all the political lies in a new revolutionary act, additionally realising the great potential of a young China, by freeing that stirring Chinese conscience from its historical contradictions.

So this is an intelligent political thriller, although those of a more Costas-Gavrian or Godardian intellectual purity do seem to resent seeing a crisis of the Left viewed even from a very disengaged American viewpoint, disliking the humanist American strain of populist appeal in a political context, and resenting the smooth professionalism of the presentation as a mere circus. Even stranger are the objectors to Gere's Buddhism, who seemingly take fright at the intrusion of other perspectives into their own blinkered focus! In any case, Buddhism seems clearly not to be an issue to the scriptwriter.

This film in no way presents itself as the last word on its subject - but it is an intelligent and engaging movie, which, far from slandering the Chinese in the manner some vintage Korean-War tub-thumper about the 'Yellow Peril', goes out of its way not to identify the Chinese people with their masters. Curiously, this is exactly what the film's detractors do!

There is a sly reference to the Boxer Rebellion that began China's long road to modernisation, in the person of the trusty who was sent to beat up or even kill the American, but who comes to see that the real foreign devils in this instance are the corrupted Chinese officials who have sold out to the worst foreign traits of cynicism and greed by doing back-door deals with an unscrupulous Western communications company, and who finally confesses his error with true selfless revolutionary earnestness.

The fact that this Boxer Rebellion is played out in the blockbuster film equivalent of Madison Square Gardens, and is mightily entertaining throughout, has led many critics to assume that all they have been presented with is a superficial entertainment unworthy of such a serious subject. Actually, the film is fully engaged with the tragedy and passion of the Chinese people as they try to work out their destiny, and the proof of this is that, to any unbiased observer, the film leaves one with a new respect for the Chinese people, caught up in the complexities of their own history, and struggling for a better life. There is nothing patronising; there is emphatically no United States Cavalry riding to the rescue.

And I should have thought the contempt shown throughout towards official American diplomacy and state policy would have appealed to the most anti-American leftist. But are the critics just taking fashionable left jabs at their own right-wing bogies? - and I do mean Humphrey! Let us leave these obsessives to their futile shadow-boxing, forever engaged with an opponent entirely constructed from the straw which evidently bulks out their own brain-pans.

Rambling drama about a US salesman arrested for a murder he did not commit, Red Corner has actual footage of Beijing convincingly mixed with the main shooting which gives the impression that the movie was actually made in China - and presumably with the approval of the Chinese authorities. Unfortunately, this is not really true, and the main Chinese lead - Ling Bai, whose name means 'white light' or 'white spirit' - was at Tiananmen in 1989 and emigrated to the US shortly thereafter. I've met students who lived in China at the time who absolutely refuse to discuss the situation back home; that Ling Bai does is testimony to her 'white spirit', and she really does steal the show from Gere here, in a kind of reverse Casablanca 'hill of beans' role. Whether the depiction of conditions in the Chinese judicial system is accurate or not, the movie does succeed in making the viewer understand that there are two views to almost anything, and that in China, as anywhere, power corrupts. Stacking the deck against consular officials is a nice touch, for these people are truly the cowards and turncoats the movie makes them out to be. The plot swerves from the inexplicable to the Orwellian to a love story (which does, it is true, sort of come out of nowhere), but the final scene on the tarmac does much to salvage that. Maybe Gere wanted to make the Chinese look bad, but they certainly don't need his help. Based on an incident that happened not in China but in Italy, Red Corner is viewable without ever coming close to being a great film. Its one claim to greatness is Ling Bai - she's absolutely fabulous.

Overall, this isn't a bad movie. It's a pretty decent courtroom drama - sort of "Law & Order Beijing." It's got a lot of suspense, and it provides a fascinating glimpse of the inner workings of the Chinese justice system. I offer that last point with the proviso, of course, that the star of this movie is Richard Gere, and Gere is known for having a somewhat anti-Chinese (or, more accurately, anti-People's Republic of China) outlook. The view of China presented here is an ominous one - and that's not entirely fabricated. I travelled to China a few years ago. I never got in trouble with the law (thank goodness!) but still when you're walking through Tienanmen Square and a column of Chinese soldiers suddenly comes marching right toward you shouting at you, you know that the basic message (even though you don't speak Chinese) is "get out of the way or we'll trample you!" So, yes, even in completely unthreatening circumstances, there are vaguely threatening elements to being in China.

In this movie, Gere plays Jack Moore, an American businessman trying to close a deal in China, who picks up a girl at a nightclub. She ends up being murdered in his hotel room, he's the prime suspect and it's clear that "the system" has decided he's guilty before he even goes on trial and the court flat out refuses to hear any evidence that supports him and challenges the obviously pre-arranged verdict. How Moore can triumph over this system is the issue.

All that's pretty good. Gere's performance is good. The problem is the "one American man takes on the entire People's Republic of China" scenario. Yes, Moore had a court appointed defence lawyer (played by a young U.S. based Chinese actress named Ling Bai) who becomes increasingly sympathetic to him and wants to prove his innocence, but essentially Moore does it all himself. Even in the courtroom, he essentially takes over the case, questioning witnesses - even when his lawyer is there. That all was a bit too much, and it strained the movie's credibility too far. Still, it's an entertaining and suspenseful if perhaps implausible couple of hours.